Acquiring Players

Welcome to the first in a small series of serialisations of my book “A Guide to Surviving Youth Football” If you like what you see and want to read more please do go and purchase a copy of the book by going to amazon.

Here is a small section of my chapter on one of the most important things in starting up a team – Player recruitment.

Acquiring Players

When you are starting a new team one of the most important tasks you will face is player recruitment. There is no point trying to start a team if there isn’t enough interest or demand. You don’t want to be having to convince players or twist their arms to play football. You need a group of players that want to play football; and want to play for your team. So before you start a team you need to make sure that the demand is there.

Once you have established that demand is there you then need to start getting players signed up. You can do this in many ways. Most youth football teams are started by a small nucleus of friends who then manage to get their other friends to join. If you’ve got a team full of friends this is a good start. They will all get on and know each other but you need to remember you aren’t starting a youth social club. You want players there who want to play football and aren’t just doing it so that they can hang out with their friends. On top of this if you have a team of friends you have to remember that when good friends fall out with each other the fallout can be even worse than if just two team mates have a serious disagreement. If you have a team of friends and two of them fall out it may force the rest to pick sides and that could create a division within your team.

The way most coaches go about getting players is through local advertising and press. They will contact the local press and ask if they can announce details about the team and training. They will then start putting up flyers and posters with all the information on in schools, local youth organizations and community notice boards.

Another common way is to hold an open trial where you invite players from all around to try out at a one off session and then based on who performs well the coach will decide who to take on. This is a practice which is normally done by academy and centre of excellence teams. If you have an open trial and not many players show up then it becomes a pointless exercise as it means you have to take them all on and will still need to find more players from somewhere.

If after advertising you aren’t getting enough players in then you have to start digging deeper to uncover talent. This is where you need to start talking to P.E staff at your local schools to see if they can get the word out. It’s always good to get in touch with your league or your local FA and see if they have any suggestions or ways in which they can help. You can also start looking at young people in your age bracket that play other sports as they may be interested in taking up football and there may be skills that they have learnt in their sport which they can bring over to football. Failing this if your team is part of a big club then you need to speak to all the teams and find out if players in the other teams have relatives or friends that would be interested in joining your team.

(Photo by michaelholden)

www.theyouthfootballguide.com

Edit: We will have a find a player feature on our site some time next year. Stay tuned. Bluefields.com

Related Posts:

• Training
• The Youth Football Guide – No. 5: Leagues
• Pre-Season Build Up
• A Guide to Surviving Youth Football
• The Youth Football Guide – No. 6: Home Games